Writer

IDP

You may have noticed my support for Rise Foundation. In this post I’ll explain to you how and why I decided to partner with them and launch a campaign to help IDPs in Iraq survive winter by buying blankets for just US$16 each.

The Problem

More than a million people who fled persecution by Daesh/ISIS/IS face a harsh winter living rough in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq with nothing to keep them warm.

Children whose tent washed away, sheltering under a single blanket. Photo by a camp resident.

Over 1.3 million victims of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have fled to the safety of Iraq’s Kurdish north. The western province of the Kurdistan Region, Dohuk, is hardest hit. Normally home to 1.3 million people, because of its proximity to the conflicts, it is now supporting at least 820,000 displaced Syrians and Iraqis, most of whom arrived since August this year. You can read more about this in Mariam’s story.

Most of the IDPs fled at the height of summer and have only the light clothing they were wearing when they ran. The United Nations has assessed that at least 146,000 of these displaced people are at serious risk. Translated into non-NGO speak, this means that the youngest, sickest and oldest will die this winter unless they have the means to keep themselves warm.

The Campaign

A friend of mine reached an agreement with a factory in Turkey to supply and deliver high quality, thick, double blankets for US$16 each. Local government officials agreed to facilitate these across the border into the Kurdistan Region, where Rise Foundation will receive and distribute them to the areas of greatest priority.

Why Blankets?

The cheapest and fastest way to keep the most people warm.

Blankets are portable, allowing us to help communities that are not yet settled.

Blankets are cheaper than stoves and faster and easier to buy and distribute than clothes.

Culturally, most people in the region use only blankets as bedding, sleeping on simple foam mattresses on the floor.

Refugees/IDPs themselves asked mainly for blankets.

Blankets do not have the same safety risks as stoves in tents. Three children have already died as a result of a tent fire in a camp, as their parents tried to keep them warm at night.

A donation of US$16 is affordable for most people who want to help, allowing everybody the possibility to give what they can and know that their generosity has, entirely by itself, affected an entire family.

N.B. We took great care, when sourcing the blankets, to make sure that we didn’t just go for cheap, but for warm. The ones we selected are popular in the region and will keep two adults or three children warm on a cold night.

Why Rise Foundation?

Transparent, efficient, professional, fast-moving, no overheads on this project: Every penny/cent donated goes on blankets.

I was frustrated by much of what I saw in the aid sector in Kurdistan. After attending a distribution of unsolicited toys, shipped half way round the world at great cost, and distributed by well-meaning volunteers, which ended up in a near-riot between townspeople and a refugee camp, and with police officers beating children with sticks, I realised that it takes more than good will to actually do good in this situation. It requires experience and professionalism.

On the other hand I was shocked when I gained some insight on the ground into the hyper-bureaucracy of many large, well-known international organisations. So much of their time and money goes on writing reports, holding meetings, providing security to international staff, salaries and marketing. They also source most of their goods from far away, meaning urgent aid arrives months too late and with incredibly high shipping costs. Neither do government agencies seem willing to help. In a meeting with the British Department for International Development (DfID) officials in October I was informed that while they had a £13 million budget for Iraq, they couldn’t spend it right then because of political issues (Iraqi and British).

So I decided to partner with registered charity Rise Foundation for the following reasons:

They are intelligent, insightful and experienced; they are capable of making the right assessments of what is needed and where.

They are honest and trustworthy and all of their accounting is fully transparent.

They are relatively small and efficient, and for this project all of their overheads have been paid, meaning that all money donated goes directly on blankets, not on administration.

They co-ordinate well with other NGOs and government departments inside Kurdistan so that efforts don’t overlap.

They are religiously and politically unaffiliated and base distributions on to needs-assessments only.

Final Thoughts

This campaign enables people from all around the world to make a significant impact on the lives of innocent people caught up in terrible circumstances beyond their control. For many of the most vulnerable, a single blanket could be the difference between life and death this winter.

I realise that the ‘your x amount of dollars/pounds can do this’ is a hackneyed phrase in charitable appeals, but in this case it absolutely means that, because every US$16 donated is guaranteed to buy a blanket.

When the first distribution of 5,000 blankets is made, Rise Foundation will make sure that somebody takes a picture of every single person who receives a blanket. With some technical assistance we hope to be able to display this to all of our donors (sign up for email updates after you’ve donated and they’ll send you things like that direct).

How you can help

But we also need you to spread the word, because greater understanding of the issues, and personal recommendation is key to raising awareness and support for this endeavour. If you believe in our campaign, please become an ambassador for it and sent this post out as an email to your friends, or create your own message about why you believe this is an opportunity to make a little bit of money go a long way to help people in great need.

Please also spread the word on social media. You can use the posters from this post on both twitter and Facebook, and the hashtag #buyablanket. You can contact me on my facebook page if you have any further questions.

One of Rise Foundation’s projects has been to distribute food on a weekly basis to displaced families living in unfinished buildings around Erbil.

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Working on the #buyablanket campaign with Rise Foundation I became quite frustrated that I couldn’t just use the word ‘refugee’ to describe people who fled violence in Iraq to the Kurdish north of the country. Everybody understands what it means to seek refuge from fear of persecution and violence, but I felt that people would just be flummoxed by ‘IDP’ – a bland, unevocative acronym. I began to look into it and discovered that the distinction is far deeper and the implications more wide-reaching than just semantics.

Spot the difference: IDPs or refugees?

The short answer

– An IDP (Internally Displaced Person) is somebody forced to flee their home to another part of their own country.

– A refugee is somebody forced to flee their home and seek refuge in another country.

The legal answer

According to the 1951 Convention on Human Rights, a refugee is somebody who…

“owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable…to return to it.”

An IDP is… well, an IDP has no status in international law. They have the same human rights as any other person in the world, and as civilians they are theoretically protected in armed conflict, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has no responsibility for them, and no other nation or international body is required to assist them.

Map of global internal displacement as of 2012. Click picture to enlarge.

So who looks out for IDPs?According to the United Nations (UN), respect for sovereignty is paramount, and as such

“It is the Governments of the states where internally displaced persons are found that have the primary responsibility for their assistance and protection. The international community’s role is complementary.”

Well that sounds fair enough – governments need to be held accountable for the protection of their own citizens, no matter where they choose to live.Theoretically, yes, but many of the countries where people are forced from their homes because of armed conflict, are not in a position to adequately support mass movements of people. Not only that, but many of these countries are in varying degrees of internal conflict, and the government may not be willing or able to protect certain sections of society. In some countries it may not even be clear who the government actually are.

Official boundary of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

How does this affect Iraq? I thought it was a functioning democracy?Yes, it is. On paper. But in reality it is in a state of near-civil war. The politics will be explained in a separate post, but in essence you have Sunni and Shi’a Arabs fighting for power in the main body of Iraq, and the Kurds quietly setting up their own country-in-waiting in the north.

The Kurdistan Region has its own government and security forces and operates virtually as a separate country. This means that it is largely protected from the violence of the rest of Iraq. This is also the reason that many of the minorities persecuted by Daesh (ISIS) have sought refuge there.

So shouldn’t thegovernment in Baghdad just send more money up to the Kurdistan region now that more people are living there? That’s what should happen. But there’s a long-running dispute between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), so they are not helping out in any substantial way.

UN report on the influx of refugees up to late August 2014. The situation has continued to worsen. A note on numbers: The UN counts family units and then estimates them at 6 people per family. In reality many families in this region are far larger.

So what’s the situation for IDPs in the Kurdistan Region?Dire. The local government and ordinary Kurds have been going all out to help IDPs arriving in their region, but the numbers are just too great. In Dohuk province – the area closest to the most troubled area of Iraq, they have now more than 800,000 IDPs, plus at least 200,000 Syrian refugees.

Most of the IDPs arrived in June-August 2014, particularly those fleeing the conflict in Shingar. Since the normal population of Dohuk is only around 1.3 million, that’s nearly double the amount of people now surviving off the same resources as last year. Imagine the whole population of Virginia turning up in North Carolina over two months, or every citizen of Scotland moving to East Anglia in a month. What if they all turned up with nothing but the clothes they stood up in? How would that affect the lives of ordinary people?

I can tell you because I’ve seen Dohuk first hand. Normal life has stopped; children cannot go to school because IDPs are living in them all; hospitals are running out of resources; building work has ceased as IDPs live in all the building sites. These are just a few of the areas of impact. And yet the international community has no obligation to help.

Some international and government agencies are doing so, but the only ones acting with any urgency are the locally-based NGOs. I feel a separate blog post coming on about my experiences of NGOs in Iraq, so I’ll end by saying that if you want to help, I recommend visiting www.rise-foundation.org/buyablanket, which at least tackles the most urgent issue of how these people are going to survive a harsh winter in the northern mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Further Reading

– For a sense of the living conditions for the IDPs, read my last blog post on Yezidi girl Mariam and her family.

– For facts and figures on Iraq’s IDPs and other people in need, see this very clear, one page UN report IRQ_snapshot_en_141014.